Monday, March 30, 2015

A video tour of Jewish Baghdad

When 140, 000 Jews left Iraq, whatever happened to the property they left behind?

This report on the Hona Baghdad Channel (Arabic) has been stirring Jewish memories on social media. It begins with a visit to the home of Sasson Heskel, modern Iraq's first Finance Minister, now an arts centre. The programme's presenter then takes us to see the Watania primary school which
was located near Qunbar-Ali. The principal was the Arabist Ezra Hadad.

After a visit to Sook Hanoon, we are taken to the imposing entrances of Jewish homes in Abu Nawas St in Bataween, a new district of Baghdad built along the Tigris in the 1930s.

Emile Cohen in London makes periodic appearances on Skype. He describes how the last desperate Jews of Iraq escaped from their homes leaving the television switched on, so that no one would suspect they would be gone for good.

Most of the houses had been sequestrated by the government. There was no chance of the Jews getting restitution - the Jews were considered 'the enemy'.

The overall impression is of neglected sites badly in need of repair, with graffiti on the walls and rubbish strewn all around. Few Jews would recognise their homes, schools and markets in Baghdad today.

PS The video ends with a view of Baghdad's new Jewish cemetery, with its 2, 000 graves. The land was donated by the Daniel family after the government destroyed the original Baghdad cemetery in 1958.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)